Eric Rauchway: Karl Rove and the common people
Karl Rove deserves to be remembered as the man who thought Americans should have enough education to understand his fables but not enough to doubt them. Here's Rove, according to Nicholas Lemann in 2001 (The New Yorker doesn't seem to have it online):
There's no more suitable summary for his career as adviser to President Bush; he is a man who thinks that if you knew a little more about what was going on, you'd vote against his candidate. So he doesn't want you to know.
People in my line of work have more reason to worry about Rove's stepping down than anyone except perhaps his erstwhile employers; now he has time to indulge his professed interest in U.S. history, and particularly U.S. history of the early 20th century. Back in 2000, he went around telling everyone "It's 1896," and explaining that the Republicans back then established a 30-year majority that ended only with the Great Depression. It's a dubious contention on the face of it -- the Democrats held the presidency, House, and Senate for much of the 1910s. And of course, Rove doesn't appear to have engineered anything like such a majority now. Joshua Green writes about it in The Atlantic.
With the would-be McKinleyesque Rove/Bush presidency waning, all the presidential hopefuls are vying to be Theodore Roosevelt -- you get T.R. from Obama, Clinton, Giuliani, Romney, and of course John McCain: " 'I quote him as often as I can,' McCain acknowledged." According to -- well, several people but including me, actually -- they aren't doing such a great job of imitating Roosevelt. Roosevelt did let the war in the Philippines peter out to an inconclusive halt, but generally, for such a belligerent-sounding guy, he ran a much more peaceable presidency than any of his latter-day admirers are likely to do.
Everyone's writing about Rove now as if he were riding off into the sunset, working up pieces on his legacy and suchlike; it would be shocking if Rove himself didn't turn up in one or another GOP candidate's campaign roster before many months go by. Unless, of course, you think Patrick Leahy and the rest of the congressional Democrats are sincere about pursuing the White House's abuses of power.
Read entire article at Altercation (Blog)
Our education plan allows us to make further gains in the suburbs. It will also allow us to make gains with Hispanics and African-Americans. ... As people do better, they start voting like Republicans -- unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.
There's no more suitable summary for his career as adviser to President Bush; he is a man who thinks that if you knew a little more about what was going on, you'd vote against his candidate. So he doesn't want you to know.
People in my line of work have more reason to worry about Rove's stepping down than anyone except perhaps his erstwhile employers; now he has time to indulge his professed interest in U.S. history, and particularly U.S. history of the early 20th century. Back in 2000, he went around telling everyone "It's 1896," and explaining that the Republicans back then established a 30-year majority that ended only with the Great Depression. It's a dubious contention on the face of it -- the Democrats held the presidency, House, and Senate for much of the 1910s. And of course, Rove doesn't appear to have engineered anything like such a majority now. Joshua Green writes about it in The Atlantic.
With the would-be McKinleyesque Rove/Bush presidency waning, all the presidential hopefuls are vying to be Theodore Roosevelt -- you get T.R. from Obama, Clinton, Giuliani, Romney, and of course John McCain: " 'I quote him as often as I can,' McCain acknowledged." According to -- well, several people but including me, actually -- they aren't doing such a great job of imitating Roosevelt. Roosevelt did let the war in the Philippines peter out to an inconclusive halt, but generally, for such a belligerent-sounding guy, he ran a much more peaceable presidency than any of his latter-day admirers are likely to do.
Everyone's writing about Rove now as if he were riding off into the sunset, working up pieces on his legacy and suchlike; it would be shocking if Rove himself didn't turn up in one or another GOP candidate's campaign roster before many months go by. Unless, of course, you think Patrick Leahy and the rest of the congressional Democrats are sincere about pursuing the White House's abuses of power.